Harimedia Forum

Hari writes to Drpta in Discussions with Hari: "After death our conscious energy defines who we are."
In my humble opinion conscious energy is our nature, our essence as conscious beings, that what we are made of so called in the nonphysical nature of ours. But does this nature or essence we are comprised or made of spiritually really gives us our identity? Does a person not has an own identtity besides that what apparently comprises his or her essence? Who am I is therefore in my opinion more important to know than just what i am in my nonphysical essence.

This question touches exactly the same thing as taught by the followers of Caitanya. You define yourself by your conscious energy, and after death your identity is what you have defined yourself as during life. If you don't identify yourself as anything specific, your next body will give you an identification to have, since you can't interact with others without an identity. And as long as you have not developed a spiritual identity, you cannot interact on the spiritual (or subtle) platform, and interact only as the body you have.
This also means that everything you do in life, or rather your consciousness when you do it, is important, since that defines you, tells what you are. So in death you continue to be what you are in life, and you will go to a destination matching that consciousness.

Thanks dear Prisni for your thoughtful clarification on this matter. It makes sense to me what you wrote above. It seems to me that without identification with something life as we know it is not possible. I personally have my problems to identify myself just with a certain "thing" however you would like to call that "thing". Conscious energy or like it is called in certain cultures and scriptures, Brahman or whatever. A certain type of individual feature or personality is very important to me. But that is just me. Others vallue it differently. And the interesting thing about this is that in "Gods kingdom" there seems to be place for everyone indiferetly of ones personal or impersonal understandings or certain types of identifications.

I wrote anything, since anyone is easily taken as someone else. I can only identify as myself, but who am I?
There is an ongoing debate about that. One version is that we don't know, our permanent identity has not yet evolved, so life is an opportunity to try different identities to see how we like it, so that we finally figure out what identity we like the best. Death in that process has no reveiling quality, it is life which is important. Death then is just like a bus-stop were we are waiting for the next bus, waiting to try our next identity.

To go to paradise or godhead after death, as a reward for good behavior and being a true believer, makes no sense. Who do they think God is? Someone cheap that you just have to kiss the ass of, to reach the highest destination. That is really making life extremely boring, if it is only to get such a reward.